Re: [ANN] Windows MSI Installer for PUC-Lua - Proof Of Concept

[Russell Haley <russ.haley@...>]

On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 10:11 AM, John Hind <john.hind@zen.co.uk> wrote:
> The Lua source distribution builds and runs just fine on Visual Studio
> (Community - free - Edition) on Windows 10. At least VS 2015 and 32-bit,
> I've not got around to rebuilding any of my projects with VS 2017 yet and do
> not really see the point of a 64-bit binary (32-bit runs fine on 64-bit
> Windows). Just dump the source files into an empty Win32 C++ Console project
> (File|New|Project|Other Languages|Win32|Win32 Console Application) and you
> are good to go. You may need some linker settings to make it truly stand
> alone as it will probably depend on "Visual Studio Redistributables" by
> default, although if you let VS make the installer package it will install
> those too if necessary.
>
> Microsoft are hopeless at adopting their own snake-oil and despite promoting
> C# and the CLR for years now most of their own code base is still C++ so
> that still gets first-class tooling in VS.
>
> The problems using Lua on Windows start with third-party libraries and the
> Linux-inspired distribution formats. Unlike most library developers,
> Roberto's team have done an excellent job making Lua sources compile without
> change just about anywhere C is spoken.

Thanks for the input!

I am now seeing the complications of including LuaRocks and other
applications and libraries. I understand why the other distributions
for windows have become bloated because there is so much dependency on
linked libraries and external dependencies. I think my focus is
changing. I want to provide a dead simple installer for installing the
latest PUC Lua on any Windows machine. I'll look at other optional
items like LuaRocks (i.e. chaining lr4win) if I get the basics done
first.

I have to say for a beginner, ZeroBrane is an excellent option as it
simply downloads and works. It also has lots of tutorials and examples
that run right through the UI. Nice job Paul! I wonder out loud if
there is a way to run Lua outside the IDE or deploy solutions.

Russ